Anchorage here we come

Slept well for 5,5 hours. The hotel is very quiet and, as we noticed this morning, our room has a view towards a (frozen) lake where floatplanes usually start (not many right now). Since we were awake at 8:30 am, we decided to take the bus into town to explore the city. Not too cold (about -3 deg. C) and sunny, walkways icy everywhere, but not much snow. Ice sculptures in one of the public parts (see pic) show that it is constantly cold, though, in Alaskans' opinion, it's a too warm winter. Traffic is very sparse in the city, not much foot-traffic neither. Tourists like us sort of stick out. Cars are rather big trucks here, with special tires with spikes. Dowtown doesn't appear highly metropolitan or fancy, rather rustic with some sort of golddigger/pioneer atmosphere. One big shopping mall on the main axles of town, 4th/5th Ave., many outfitters, a couple of restaurants and many Alaskan souvenir shops.



The Alaska Railroad was constructed in 1915 and there is a nice, architectually remarkable railroad station (see pic) in town (see pic). Crossing the tracks we reached the Ulu Factory (pic right side),a knife factory - knives and wooden boards to go with, produced on the property. Ulu knifes had been traditionally used by Native people of the Arctic, they come in a naturally curved shape with a wooden (or stone) handle.

Anchorage, only founded in 1920, is not the capital of Alaska (Juneau), but the largest city in the state with a population of about 300.000. Considering that the whole state of Alaska has about 740.000 inhabitants, it's a real metropolis! Alaska has only became a State in 1959 (the 49th, just followed by Hawaii). In 1867 the U.S. Government had purchased Alaska from Russia for "only" $ 7.2 mio. - what a deal considering the vast stretch of land! Russian explorers were the first to inspect Alaska in the beginning of the 18th century and they have later established an active fur trade. Similar to the Spanish in the South they had built their forts and missions and had tried to "educate" the Native people.

About the native people - about 20 % of the population today - we learned a lot in the Anchorage Art Museum (see pic), which is much more about history than about art (only a couple smaller changing art exhibitions). In the Alaska Gallery it's all about Alaska's history, in the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center it's exclusively about Indians (Atabascans, Northwest Coast Indians - Haida and Tlingit - and Aleuts) and Inuit/Eskimo. Especially this section is very nicely done and very instructive (see pic)!We spent almost two hours in this museum before we took the bus (which is mostly used by local natives) back to the hotel.